Leadership and real moral issues

The great German weekly newspaper Die Zeit leads this week with two articles placed side by side. The first has to do with the current problems between the governing coalition partners and the apparent lack of leadership from the Bundeskanzlerin, Angela Merkel; the second is about the hidden power of Google. At first I wondered why they had been put together on the front page, but then I began to understand.

There is a bit of a crisis in Germany over how the Schwarz-Gelb (conservative-liberal) coalition can hold together. They are arguing about everything and a crisis summit is about to take place. However, the real pressure is on Angela Merkel who has remained remarkably quiet and ‘absent’ in recent weeks while the arguments raged around her. It is her leadership style that is now in question.

Merkel’s ‘reserved’ style was welcome after Germany’s electorate had grown fed up of years of endless conflict and controversy. But, as the world around has changed in the last couple of years, this style of leadership has (according to some commentators) led to a vacuum in orientation or leadership of the governing class. What was appropriate in the last Great Coalition is proving inadequate in the new coalition in which the two small parties (CSU and FDP) are at odds with each other and are not being brought to book.

Furthermore, Merkel’s style was helpful in her other role as leader of her party, the CDU. She faces the same problem as David Cameron in the UK: how do you modernise a conservative party without alienating your reactionary core and still remain electable as a coherent party? Quietly-quietly served her well in the last government, but it is coming apart now.

Obviously more could be said about this, but I want to move on. Leadership is a tough matter at the best of times and any leader knows how fickle the ‘led’ can be: waving in support one minute and calling for your head the next. Short-term memories on the part of the electorate do not always lead to good policy-making by those in charge. But Merkel’s plight (which Die Zeit partly attributes to her hands-off approach to the detailed negotiations of the coalition terms) highlights a problem for good leadership anywhere: how to recognise that a different style is now needed and to gauge whether or not I am equipped to offer it.

I have written about this in relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury, so won’t repeat it here. But, leadership is a lonely business, especially when trying to lead at the same time as ‘read the runes’ of the wider mood.

And how does this connect with Google? Well, the article about Google articulates a widespread concern in Germany (Der Spiegel ran it as its cover story last week) that Google knows too much about us all and that this is dangerous. This debate has been running in the UK, too, but it is set against a historical backdrop in Germany that gives it a particular significance if not poignancy. (Interestingly, Spiegel is also suspicious about Google’s weak challenge to the Chinese…)

The link between the two articles (in my mind, at least) is this: how do leaders identify the really important issues that demand their attention? Helmut Schmidt has this week noted the return of the bonus culture amongst bankers and said that the seeds of the next financial crisis have been sown in thsi one because we understand more, but refuse to face the need for radical change. So, the financial crisis is up their with bankers’ bonuses. Then there are the economic and ecological challenges to our world and our societies. There is no end to the list of demanding ‘issues’ – and, as I have observed elsewhere, leaders are regarded as ‘leading’ only when they are shouting loudly what ‘I’ want to hear them say.

While Merkel and other government leaders (including in the UK) find all sorts of issues to concern them and dominate their agendas, there is one that seems to draw attention only from sections of the media and interest groups: the surveillance culture. Even the Church preoccupies itself with a limited list of ‘moral issues’ – sex is always at the top despite Jesus saying little about it; money is much lower down although Jesus said loads about it – while ignoring the tough ones that are more hidden.

Well, I want to stand with the editors of Die Zeit (whether they intended the link or not) and put a challenge to government (and other) leaders to take seriously developments in our surveillance society and put it higher up the list of ‘moral issues’ that demand attention. In the hands of a benign government there might be little to lose from being ‘watched’; but the potential for misuse of information is enormous even in such a society as ours.

So, how about some leadership in relation to the UK government’s will to retain email and mobile information, to collect and retain DNA samples from everybody imaginable, to photograph people in London over 300 times a day from ubiquitous cameras, and to retain as much information on everybody in as compact a manner as possible? Given the interconnectedness of the modern digital world and the propensity of human beings to misuse power in the interests of power, this is a debate that needs to be had now.

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2 Responses to “Leadership and real moral issues”

To quote that great Anglican politician (and multi-linguist) J. Enoch Powell: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
Germany might have fewer political problems if it had a first-past-the post electoral system as in the UK and the US. FPTP might be inherently unfair but it usually makes for parliamentary majorities and may (only may) moderate right and left – instead of on again/off again flirtations/horse trading in coalitions.
But maybe that would be mere tinkering when msot laws in Europe aren’t even made by the elected representatives but by the mandarins of the unelected European Commission.
The demographic and social problems that an aging, post-Christian Europe are facing are really cultural and spiritual in character, and no politician will address them for fear of being decried as ‘bigoted’, racist or ‘Islamophobic’. That’s the real significance of George Carey’s and Michael Nazir-Ali’s recent remarks about the change in British identity, caused principally by immigration.
Nick, your last paragraph on Britain’s surveillance culture makes you sound positively libertarian! I’m sure you’d agree that recreating the Stasi in the UK is not a good idea. But that is what this vast monitoring, recording and data basing of the UK public by the Blair/Brown government has logically been leading up to (all in a good cause, of course: “fighting terrorism, protecting children, combating homophobia, promoting community cohesion2 etc etc).

Well said, I couldn’t agree more. The argument that if you have nothing to hide why worry is just not acceptable and we need to address this. I am disappointed that David Davis appears to have done so little on this since he was re-elected.

Technology is moving on and we will not stop it. A few years ago a colleague of mine was stopped on his way to the Laboput Party conference at Bournemouth. The police had picked him up on ANPR and wanted to know why he had also been to the Tory party conference and was he a terrorist? He was actually part of a lobby group that had stands at all the conferences.

Laughable at face value, but what if this data gets put on his record? If he applies for a security sensitive job what will happen?

All the cameras arund are not too much of a threat at the moment because nobody has the time to scan all the data by human eye, but that is changing and the technology is now emerging to analyse it automatically, and identify individuals and cross match. That makes me uncomfortable.

I see this week that parking fines are now being issued from remote cameras with no ticket being issued. Totally reliant on processed data and with no opportunity for the recipient to challenge because he doesn’t know until later that he has allegedly been transgressing and so to collect evidence that he wasn’t.

We have seen the mess that our reputedly benign government makes of keeping our data secure. When our genes are recorded and so our propensity to disease is supoposedly revealed what will this do for our employment and health insurance prospects?

Start combinging all the data, as we now are and we face a nightmare scenarion. Correct data, misconstrued can be very threatening. Incorrect data and assumptions based on computer analysis and then presented as fact can be totally destructive.

I believe these things dehumanise us and turn us into citizens not people. I don’t know how it can be stopped or controlled because to do that somebody has to oversee it and would we abe able to trust them?

We need the debate, and we need a way of fighting back to stop this relentless move. It seems to me the terrorists have succeeded – thay have managed to get us to take away our own freedoms and liberty.